Poems and Ballads: Second Series was published by Chatto & Windus in 1878. The collection marks a significant shift in Swinburne’s poetry: the erotic provocations and pagan celebrations of the first Poems and Ballads give way to elegiac meditation, sea poetry, and a more inward lyricism. The technical mastery remains — if anything, it deepens — but the subjects are less inflammatory, and the emotional register shifts from ecstasy and defiance toward melancholy and acceptance.
“Ave Atque Vale” (Hail and Farewell) — Swinburne’s elegy for Charles Baudelaire, who died in 1867 — is one of the great English elegies, rivaling Shelley’s “Adonais” and Tennyson’s “In Memoriam” in sustained power. The poem addresses Baudelaire not as a moral example or a cautionary tale but as a fellow artist, a kindred spirit whose work explored the same territories of desire, beauty, and darkness that Swinburne’s own verse inhabited.
“A Forsaken Garden” is perhaps Swinburne’s most perfect single lyric: a meditation on a cliff-top garden (based on the ruins at East Dene on the Isle of Wight) where love once flourished and where now only wind and sea remain. The poem achieves an effects of extraordinary beauty through simple means — repetition, rhythm, and the contrast between past life and present emptiness.
The sea poems — “On the Cliffs,” “By the North Sea” — demonstrate Swinburne’s ability to render the physical world with the same intensity he brought to emotional states. The sea was his lifelong obsession: he swam in it daily, nearly drowned in it repeatedly, and wrote about it with an immediacy that suggests physical immersion in language.
Collecting Poems and Ballads: Second Series
First edition (Chatto & Windus, London, 1878): Green cloth binding.
Market values:
- First edition, fine: $80–$200
- Very good: $30–$80